this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Technology
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That so many people think Mastodon is hard to join makes me think that there are a lot of people on the internet now who have never learned how to use the internet
Something I often need to keep in mind is that when I was growing up the home PC was pretty crude and mysterious. You had to learn what a command line was, you had to learn about data backups and file trees, you had to learn about navigation and discovery of the web.
Sure you might not have done any of this stuff for decades now, depending on how you engage with the infernal devices, but if you see a forum you know what that is, how it works, what you expect to find inside. If you see URLs with like foo.com/place@otherfoo you kinda intuitively grasp what that is saying.
But if you're like 20 now probably the first computer you ever touched was a magic box where you just clicked things to open stuff and they managed their own little things. Clicked a thing to install other clicky things. You don't know what a config file is, why would you? you don't really use URLs much, you just click the internet and start typing and then click the right link etc.
To a lot of those people some of this stuff is as arcane as like arch linux is to your average millennial PC user. Despite fedi (and arch! I use arch btw) actually being really simple and obvious there's a barrier of unfamiliarity and a lot of basic skills you need to learn first.
This is what I've observed in Gen Z and younger - they just expect functional UIs, and to have pre-setup file directories and libraries, but don't actually know what those things are and what they do.
Yeah it's just the result of progress. I've watched people my age get stunlocked by carburettor issues or the concept of a choke. It's unfortunate but sleekness often trades off with user serviceability.
Rather than being all "hgngh grrr the damn kids with their geegaws and whimgets don't know how to use a simple butter churn" we have to teach people how to feel confident learning different ways of doing things and most importantly why they should care to do so.